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The geopolitical and market bogeymen of the moment – Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, tariffs, cyber warfare – are riding tall in the saddle.
That’s sparked something of a “flight to safety,” which ignited a bit of an uptick in demand for Treasuries this …

If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that’s what these corporations will pursue.As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 201…

This weekend, I’d like to take a slightly nostalgic trip down Memory Lane, into the dark, swirling menacing pool that was the dawn of the Internet. OK, that sentence didn’t end up quite where I meant it to.

When I started my newsletter business in October of 2000, I decided to have a little fun with it on this new thing called the World Wide Web, aka “the internet.” If you, like me, are of a certain age, you remember well that we started every web address with the ubiquitous www.

WSJ: “Ten Years After the Bear Stearns Bailout, Nobody Thinks It Would Happen Again.” Myriad changes to the financial structure have seemingly safeguarded the financial system from another 2008-style crisis. The big Wall Street financial institutions…

It has been 2 months since I last had a chance to respond to reader comments. This seems like a good time to pause and take the opportunity to do so again. Keep them coming!

Today, since I’m in a contrarian mood, I thought I’d focus on ever-so-kindly replying to people who don’t see eye to eye with me…

I really enjoy these exchanges. They get my creative analytical juices flowing, and force me to consider alternative viewpoints which I may not have done initially.

In fact, the more rebuttals I write, the kinder I feel! Which is why I’ve decided to report a special gold opportunity today (continuing our prickly theme with an investment that is the very definition of contrarian right now).

If indeed this inflation hysteria has passed, its peak was surely late January. Even the stock market liquidations that showed up at that time were classified under that narrative. The economy was so good, it was bad; the Fed would be forced by rapid economic acceleration to speed themselves up before that acceleration got out…

The Economics Definition of Sanity: Keep Doing The Same Thing Over and Over Because It Has To Work One of These Times

We live in an age of statistics. They are everywhere, including a whole lot of junk numbers (endless studies) that don’t pass minimum scrutiny. Somehow, statistics have become the gold standard for at least the mainstream media in framing our view of everything from new discoveries to further exploration into how things work.

That’s fine for a discipline like quantum physics where the utterly complex probability models have been repeatedly tested and validated. It’s a far different proposition in the softer sciences where the rules of science aren’t as easily determined.

In 1972, Karl Popper in further defining the scientific process in this modernizing age said that,

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

It’s a warning that I try to take to heart, seeing as I do eurodollars lurking ominously behind every global problem. But Popper also said at the same time, “no rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” In other words, as long as I stick to a broad enough survey of evidence then proceeding as I do on the monetary explanation for at least economic deficiencies is a legitimate, rational inquiry.

Liquidity moves markets!

For others in places of power and influence, this is just not the case. Claiming, as Federal Reserve officials have done, data dependence does not make it so. Words are cheap, and like it or not central banks all around the world have been in heavy action for ten years. That’s a record of experimentation more than sufficient to draw reasonable, sound conclusions.

If you knew nothing about what each of these monetary institutions had done this past decade, instead realizing only what the economy has been like at each significant moment along the way, you might expect that central bankers were busiest in 2008 before becoming much less so over time. That was, after all, the time of greatest obvious and immediate need, when the economy was crashing.

Given how the economy is described today in pretty glowing terms, it would seem as if there would have been far less of a requirement for monetary intervention the closer we have moved toward recovery. And that’s how things are being described, here and everywhere else. Policymakers themselves don’t much use that word, but the others that they do use (“transitory”) all point in that direction.

But that’s not what happened. Central banks actually started small and have only escalated from there. In three separate doses, each of the majors (I’m focusing on the US and Europe here, but you could also include China and Japan, the latter grouping together its plethora of QE’s into specific intervals) have significantly increased the size of their “stimulus” programs over time.

Given that the worst contraction took place, again, in 2008 and early 2009, it doesn’t seem obvious why the Fed and ECB would wait until many years later to really go big; that is until you realize that what’s motivating these central banks is not the immediate linear contraction in GDP but instead what’s holding each economy back from reaching actual, complete recovery.

To put it another way, what really has mattered in setting monetary policy is the gap between actual output and where these economies would be if the Great “Recession” had actually been a recession. The Fed, ECB, and the others, especially PBOC among that latter group, all responded based on that distance and really what it was that was creating it (for them exogenous, hidden eurodollar decay).

Because it happened in succession like that, their immediate impulse was to go bigger each time, an act almost of palpable frustration in reverse order to how you would think it would go. As each iteration was thwarted by “something” outside of their worldview, they met the challenge by changing the quantity variable in QE even though direct, linear economic consequences were smaller after 2008.

These gaps matter, even if central bankers and Economists (redundant) can’t directly appreciate them or why. They kept trying harder as more time passed because these programs weren’t working. Though the single contraction was larger ten years ago, it really represented just the initial departure point where the problem has only grown bigger.

By acting in this way, the smallest of silver linings has been their very experiments disproving the theories behind them – especially the one that views bank reserves as universally useful “money.” At least that is the scientific view of the grand scheme, for Economists are ideologues rather than scientists, rejecting as they have clear falsification.

According to the Wall Street Journalyesterday (and thanks to M. Simmons for the thankless task of keeping up with these dogmatists), some Fed officials know that there is something very wrong but that instead they just need to keep doing what hasn’t worked until it does. I’m absolutely positive that’s not what Karl Popper had in mind, for what is called here a “seismic shift” is nothing like one.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams says fundamental uncertainties about the economy mean officials may need to weigh a seismic shift in how they conduct monetary policy.

What fundamental uncertainties? Primarily, at the moment, these:

To address them, Williams wants to look at price level targeting, changing the monetary policy definition of price stability from an inflation-centered one (the change in price levels). As San Francisco Fed President, he has a significant platform for influence within the FOMC, having bolstered his orthodox credentials with a great deal of research into R* and other related matters that seem to have achieved an official following for his views. Thus, as an influential Fed official, we have to be grossly discouraged by this:

“If your price level is below target like it is today, because we’ve had years of running the inflation rate below our target and the price level is now well below what the target would have been if we had a price level target in 2012, it would say just keep stimulating the economy without really focusing on is this the right employment or output level,” Mr. Williams said.

“It would just say keep stimulating the economy until you get that price level back up,” said.

How about instead of “keep stimulating” we actually look at the evidence whether anything has been stimulated at all. Again:

That’s ultimately the issue with all of this. Policymakers like Williams refuse to question their most basic assumptions, the foundation of every central bank that simply assumes that if it creates bank reserves (or just reduces some short-term interest rate) it automatically equates to “stimulus.”

This apparently unshakable belief is grounded in nothing more than regressions made and calibrated during a world that doesn’t any longer exist (and let’s face it, the world never stands still, so even in any other time period it’s a dangerous, subjective assumption to believe that you can define mathematical rules for the future based on the present or the past). And these models endure because Economics is not science; it is a belief system that features so much complex math it just seems like it should be.

It’s why you see the backwards escalation of monetary programs across the world, the idea that monetary policy did stimulate just not (never) enough. Only now after ten years, the results are all negative on the first indication; no stimulus at all. Changing the target for what they do will have the same negative effect and costs (wasting time). The rational, scientific answer would be for central banks to instead begin investigating how to change what they do (stable global credit-based currency).

Wall Street Examiner Disclosure:Lee Adler, The Wall Street Examiner reposts third party content with the permission of the publisher. I am a contractor for Money Map Press, publisher of Money Morning, Sure Money, and other information products. I curate posts here on the basis of whether they represent an interesting and logical point of view, that may or may not agree with my own views. Some of the content includes the original publisher's promotional messages. In some cases I receive promotional consideration on a contingent basis, when paid subscriptions result. The opinions expressed in these reposts are not those of the Wall Street Examiner or Lee Adler, unless authored by me, under my byline. No endorsement of third party content is either expressed or implied by posting the content. Do your own due diligence when considering the offerings of information providers.

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